The main objective of information technology is to provide support for business operations. Although in the past few years, the focus on composite application development, process applications, orchestration of services, and business process management (BPM) has improved the end-to-end business process support, flexibility, and insight into business operations, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
In this book, we will focus on design principles for process-driven architectures. We will look at how service-oriented architecture (SOA) can address the key challenges of BPM. Business process management (BPM) is a very important discipline, which is closely related to the operating efficiency, competitive position, and the ability of the company to grow. Business processes are also very closely connected with IT. One of the current challenges, which we address in this book, is how to provide support for knowledge-intensive processes. Such processes are usually complex and have many variants, and modeling them in the traditional way is inappropriate. Such knowledge-intensive processes are addressed with adaptive case management (ACM).
However, the key question is how to reduce the semantic gap between business processes and applications. SOA has emerged as a solution to these problems. In this book, we will show you how we can use SOA along with BPM. We will look at the complete life cycle, starting with business process modeling and ending with the application that implements such processes. We will see that SOA introduces new approaches with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), enterprise service bus (ESB), services, human workflow, business activity monitoring (BAM), rule engines, API management, and others to fulfill the objectives. Since the early days, SOA has introduced business events and event processing, including the capability to identify complex event patterns, which has opened up new ways for loosely-coupled integration and emphasized the ability to integrate with the Internet of Things devices, which will play an important role in business processes in the future.
The enterprise architecture (EA) is the umbrella that ties together business processes, applications, data, IT infrastructure, and the strategy of a company or organization. Enterprise architecture is the master plan, which specifies how to relate and map the strategy to the business processes and business processes to the application, data, and IT infrastructure with the objective of a coherent, well-defined, and manageable system. An important part of the EA is the business architecture (BA), which provides a bridge from the business models and the whole strategy to the business processes.
In this chapter, we will look at business processes and their relevance to IT, application systems, enterprise architecture, reference models, and modeling principles. We will do the following in this chapter:
Explain the importance of business processes
Present different classifications of business processes
Describe the business architecture and the enterprise architecture and their relation to business processes
Dig into business process management and overview its life cycle
Discuss process modeling and adaptive case management
Summarize modeling principles and best practices
Discuss process execution, monitoring, and analytics
Explain process optimization
Explain how SOA and BPM fit together and discuss new frontiers for SOA
A business process consists of a set of coordinated activities that accomplish a particular business goal. The order of these activities and the efficiency of those who perform the activities determine the overall performance of a business process.
Note
A business process is a set of coordinated activities that are performed either by humans or by tools with the objective to realize a certain business result.
In today's competitive market, the efficiency of a company is a key criterion for success because, in addition to innovation, operating efficiency is key to improving the company's competitive advantage in the market. Knowing and understanding the details of business processes is therefore highly important because this gives us the opportunity to identify the bottlenecks and optimize business processes. Having highly-optimized business processes is one of the most important priorities of companies.
Note
Optimized business processes are increasingly important for companies as they provide the company with a competitive advantage. With BPM/SOA, companies can optimize business processes easily, with less effort, and in a shorter time than with previous approaches.
However, it's not only the competitive advantage that matters; companies also need to react to changes in the global market, to new opportunities, and to threats from other companies. They react with modifications to their business processes.
Optimizing business processes is also related to information systems. Each change in the process requires changes in the related application systems.
BPM is not only about performance improvement and adaptability. It is also about change management. BPM can help to improve organizational procedures and rules and can adhere to industry standard compliance and legal compliance.
We can get a complete understanding of a business process only when we look at the details. It's in these details that the complexity hides. We can model business processes in a variety of visual languages; the most widely used is BPMN. Until now, event process chain (EPC), extended event process chain (eEPC), UML activity diagrams, and others, such as flow charts, have been used. As we will see throughout this book, today's modeling tools, such as Oracle BPM Suite, provide comprehensive support for BPMN modeling. However, it is not enough to just model a process, it is also important to adhere to best practices, which we will explain in this book.
We use business process models to understand the processes. This gives us the opportunity to improve and optimize them. Business process optimization and re-engineering are very important, and it is up to our imagination to improve processes, integrate them to gain synergic benefits, and use other approaches to optimize them. Business process optimization is related to several important topics that should not be overlooked. We will mention just three here:
Changing business processes requires changing the way people work. And people do not like change. Therefore, in order to be successful, we need to be careful about how we apply the changes to the real world and how we motivate the employees to change their way of working. Otherwise, even a theoretical process that is highly optimized will not work in the real world.
Changing business processes does not mean changing only the behavior of the employees but requires changing the IT support and related application systems. This topic is of particular interest to us, and we will look at it in detail in the next section.
Finally, changing the business processes only once is not the key to long-lasting success. If a company wants to have long-lasting success, it should develop an environment where business processes can be continuously optimized. This is a particularly difficult task because continuous change in business processes also requires continuous change in the way employees work and in the way IT supports the business.
Often, business processes are classified into internal or private business processes and public or global business processes. Internal business processes are related to a single company. Internal processes can be local to a single organizational unit, department, or line of business, or they can span multiple units, departments, or LOBs. Public business processes, on the other hand, connect two or more companies.
Business processes are often classified as operational processes, management processes, and supporting processes. Operational processes represent the core business and are, therefore, the most important. For example, a marketing company that manages advertisement boards relies on efficient processes that start with an order for advertising and end when the advertisement is published on boards throughout the country or abroad. The faster the company can realize the orders and the faster it can react to new requirements from customers, the better it is.
Management processes are responsible for managing and governing the enterprise. Supporting processes are those processes that support the core operational processes, such as support, accounting, and so on, and are usually found in the majority of companies.
Business processes, particularly operational and management processes, are always specific to a company. Companies, therefore, cannot buy IT support for these processes in the market but have to custom develop it to address their specific needs.
In some industries, best practices related to business processes have been gathered and published. In the telecommunication sector, a well-known business process framework is the enhanced telecom operations map (eTOM). eTOM defines the best process frameworks for different aspects related to telecommunication business, such as service configuration and activation, resource management and operations, resource provisioning, and so on. Other examples include the APQC process classification framework (PCF), 8 Omega, and so on.
Such business process frameworks can be used for various reasons, including:
To standardize business processes in an industry
To ease integration between different companies from the same industry/sector
To use them as benchmarks to compare our own processes
To follow and improve our processes
Some experts are of the opinion that best practices represent the average state in the industry. If our company is benefiting from such processes, it means that our processes are no better than average. Usually, companies that are above average keep their business processes confidential because they know that their business processes reflect their true competitive advantage.
Caring about business processes is not only about improving existing processes. It is also about creating new business processes that address new digital channels and business models enabled by the digital economy. Such processes can be directed towards consumers and facilitate digital channels, such as social networks. They can also be directed towards B2B integrations. Either way, often such processes rely heavily on services and their application programming interfaces (APIs) for integration. The API management and the API economy are therefore becoming increasingly important for modern process-driven architectures.
The second important aspect is knowledge-driven processes, which exist for several activities that do not follow an exact order or always the same order. Such processes cannot be easily modeled with traditional modeling languages, such as BPMN. Therefore, adaptive case management approaches have emerged, providing the opportunity for companies to address these knowledge-intensive processes as well in a structured manner. We will talk about ACM in Chapter 9, Adaptive Case Management, of this book.
Understanding the business is not only about individual business processes. It is also important to understand how business processes at different levels fit together and how they relate to the strategy, business model, products, services, and other aspects of an enterprise.
Business processes can be at different levels of decomposition. Top-level processes represent a high-level, bird's-eye view of an enterprise, business model, and strategy. On lower levels, business processes become more detailed.
Note
Therefore, it is important to understand that BPM is not about individual business processes only, but also about the overall business architecture.
Business processes can be structured into levels. Usually, we talk about four levels of decomposition:
On the top level, we model process areas or business functions.
On level two, we model process categories, which are often organized around value chains.
On level three, we model business processes from the business perspective. As already mentioned, we often use BPMN for this step.
On level four, we model processes for implementation. We talk about automated processes and decomposition of process elements. Here, we can use executable BPMN 2 or BPEL or a combination of both.
Business processes is, however, only a part of the business architecture. The other important parts are business information, governance structure, and the overall structure of the enterprise. According to the Object Management Group (OMG): the BA is a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.
The BA addresses organization, capabilities, information, and value chains. It also addresses products and services, stakeholders, vision, strategy and tactics, projects, decisions and rules, metrics, measures and key performance indicators, policies, and rules and regulations. The various aspects of the BA are shown in the following figure:
Figure 1: Business architecture aspects
Modeling the BA has traditionally not been integrated with business process modeling. However, in Oracle BPM Suite 12c, a lightweight BA modeling tool has been introduced. As modeling the BA is intended for business people, this tool is part of the web-based business process composer. It introduces the following:
The enterprise process map is used for defining high-level business functions. This addresses the high-level decomposition, allows the identification business functions, and hierarchically orders them.
The value chain model is used to decompose each business function into a value chain. A value chain can be further drilled down into child value chains or into concrete business processes represented by BPMN models.
The strategy model is used for representing the relationship between BA artifacts. It encapsulates organization business goals, objectives, and metrics using strategy models.
Key performance indicators can also be captured within BA and represent key success metrics.
We will talk more about BA modeling using BPM Suite in Chapter 2, Modeling Business Processes for SOA – Methodology. It is, however, important to stress that integrating BA modeling with business process modeling is very important for reducing the semantic gap.
Business architecture is usually conducted as a part of the greater enterprise architecture. It is a common misperception that the EA is only about technological aspects.
Enterprise architecture is the high-level design of an organization, which includes the business architecture (business processes, organization, and people), application architecture (services, components, and applications), data architecture (data and information and data models), and IT infrastructure (software, hardware, network, and so on).
The EA applies architecture principles and sound practices to design business, information, process, and technology architectures necessary for companies to execute their strategies. The enterprise architecture is designed with these objectives: to improve manageability, effectiveness, efficiency, and agility of the business and their processes.
Today, it is believed that the enterprise architecture is the key to controlled improvement and the increased ability of organizations to change. These changes include the following:
Improvement, integration, and standardization of business processes
Innovation in the processes and organization
Quality improvement and timeliness of business information
Several methodologies for the EA exist. The most popular are the following:
The Zachman Framework™ for enterprise architectures (http://www.zachman.com/)
The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF) (http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/)
Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/e-gov/fea)
The Gartner methodology (http://www.gartner.com/technology/consulting/enterprise-architecture.jsp)
Enterprise architecture can help to choose the right architectural decisions for BPM (such as mapping to services, applications, using the right data models, and so on). It can enable reuse and make the delivery of new solutions quicker, more efficient, and better aligned with the organizational strategy. It can enable and foster governance.
In the future, the EA will tightly integrate with tools for modeling the BA and business processes and will become the top-layer modeling tool for each enterprise.
Let's now look at the broader picture of business process management, which includes business process modeling. It is, however, much more than just modeling. It is about achieving the highest level of efficiency in terms of time and cost in performing any business activity. This has been the guiding principle of successful businesses for a long time. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, published the following four principles of scientific management:
Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks
Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than leave them to train themselves
Provide detailed instructions and supervise how each worker performs in his or her discrete task
Divide work equally between managers and workers so that the managers apply scientific management principles to plan the work and the workers actually perform the tasks
Taylor defined ideas precisely about how to implement business processes efficiently. His belief was that this is possible only through enforced standardization of methods, adoption of best practices, working conditions, and cooperation.
Today, these thoughts are grouped under BPM, which is a method of aligning a business organization with the needs of its clients. BPM fosters business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. The major objective of BPM is to continuously improve the processes both within the company and with other companies (such as in supply chain management).
Until now, we saw that business processes are dynamic. To express the various stages of the business process, the business process life cycle has to be defined. A business process life cycle has to cover the following four phases:
Process modeling is related to the definition of the process model using the selected methodology and the notation.
Process implementation is related to the activities required to implement end-to-end IT support for the process.
Process execution and control is related to the actual running of the process, the supervisors controlling the process execution, and taking necessary corrective actions.
Process monitoring, analytics, and optimization is related to gathering data about the process execution. BPM provides the ability to gather real-time quantitative data using process monitoring or BAM tools. Optimization is responsible for interpreting these monitoring numbers and identifying optimization points.
The following figure shows how a process enters this circle and goes through various stages:
Figure 2: Business process life cycle
Process modeling is the phase where process analysts, together with process owners, analyze the business process and define the process model. They define the activity flow, information flow, roles, and business documents. They also define business policies and constraints, business rules, and performance measures. Performance measures are often called key performance indicators (KPIs). Examples of KPIs include activity turnaround time, activity cost, and so on.
Process implementation is the phase where the IT developers (SOA developers), together with process analysts, implement the business process with the objective of providing end-to-end support for the process using IT (applications). The process implementation phase using the SOA approach includes process implementation with executable BPMN, BPEL, decomposition in the services, identification of the service, implementation or reuse of services, and integration.
Process execution and control is the actual execution phase, where the process participants execute the various activities of the process. For end-to-end support in business processes, it is very important that IT drives the process and directs process participants to execute activities and not vice versa, where the actual process drivers are employees. An important part of this phase is process control, where process supervisors or process managers monitor whether the process is executing optimally. If delays occur, exceptions arise, resources are unavailable, or some other anomalies occur, process supervisors or managers can take corrective actions.
Process monitoring, analytics, and optimization is the final, and a very important, phase. In this phase, process owners monitor the KPIs of the process. Process analysts, process owners, process supervisors, and key users examine the process and analyze the process execution metrics. They also need to take into account the changing business conditions. They examine business issues and identify ways to improve business processes to eliminate these issues.
Once optimizations have been identified and selected, the process returns to the modeling phase to apply them. Then the process is re-implemented, and the whole life cycle is repeated. We talk about an iterative, incremental life cycle because the process is improved in each stage.
In the business process modeling phase, the main objective is to develop the process model, which will define the existing process flow in detail. The transparency of the process flow is crucial as this gives the process owners, process analysts, and all others involved an insight into what is going on. An understanding of the AS-IS process flow also ensures that we can judge the efficiency and the quality of the process.
The main objective of process modeling is the definition of the AS-IS process flow. We will model the business process to satisfy the following objectives:
To specify the exact result of the business process and to understand the business value of this result.
To understand the activities of the business process. Knowing the exact tasks and activities that have to be performed is crucial to understanding the details of the process.
To understand the order of activities. Activities can be performed in sequence or in parallel, which can help improve the overall time required to fulfill a business process. Activities can be short-running or long-running.
To understand the responsibilities and identify (and later supervise) who is responsible for which activities and tasks.
To understand the utilization of resources consumed in the business process. Knowing who uses which resource can help improve the utilization of resources as resource requirements can be planned and optimized.
To understand the relationship between people involved in the processes and their communication. Knowing exactly who communicates with whom is important and can help to organize and optimize communications.
To understand the document flow. Business processes produce and consume documents (regardless of whether they are paper or electronic documents). Understanding where the documents are going and where they are coming from is important. A good overview of the documents also gives us the opportunity to identify whether all the documents are really necessary.
To identify potential bottlenecks and points for improvement, which can be used later in the process optimization phase.
To introduce quality standards, such as ISO 9001, more successfully and to better pass certification.
To improve the understandability of quality regulations that can be supplemented with process diagrams.
To use business process models as work guidelines for new employees who can introduce themselves to the business processes faster and more efficiently.
To understand business processes, which will enable us to understand and describe the company as a whole.
A good understanding of business processes is very important for developing IT support. Applications that provide end-to-end support for business processes can be developed efficiently only if we understand the business processes in detail.
Efficient process modeling requires a modeling method that provides a structured and controlled approach to process modeling. Several modeling methods have been developed over the years. Examples include IDS Sheer's ARIS methodology, CSC's Catalyst, Business Genetics, SCOR and the extensions PCOR and VCOR, POEM, and so on.
Process modeling also requires a notation. Business Process Model and Notation 2 is the most comprehensive notation for process modeling thus far. It has been developed under the hood of Object Management Group. We will provide a detailed introduction to BPMN in Chapter 3, BPMN for Business Process Modeling.
With version 2, BPMN adds a crucial aspect—support for executable processes. Prior to BPMN 2, business processes were more or less diagrams. With version 2, BPMN has added the ability to execute BPMN process models on a process server. This way, BPMN process models have become even more valuable assets for each information system. The ability to execute BPMN models is nowadays supported by leading process servers, including Oracle BPM Suite. Support for executable processes has brought about another useful feature, that is, the ability to export BPMN process models into the interchangeable XML format, which means that, at least in theory, BPMN business processes are not dependent on a specific tool of the process server.
Until now, we have talked about strictly defined business processes. Such processes are common for scenarios where activities, the order of activities, roles, and other elements of the process are well defined and do not change often. Such processes are commonly used for scenarios where we want to standardize the work and make sure that all follow the same template.
Not all processes can be well defined in terms of strict process models. Business processes that require knowledge, work, and certain expertise usually cannot be modeled in terms of activities and transitions (such models would be too complex). Therefore, the alternative way of modeling such processes has been defined. It is called adaptive case management or advanced case management.
In contrast to traditional, rigid process modeling, in ACM, the activities within an adaptive process are identified. However, the transitions between the activities are not modeled. The transitions are either defined as rules, or it is up to the knowledge workers to identify the right order of activities for a certain case. However, the tools that support ACM should provide the ability to monitor, update, understand, and interpret every activity as it is processed. We will talk more about ACM in Chapter 9, Adaptive Case Management.
The AS-IS process model for each business process consists of the top-level process model, which shows the high-level activities and the flow of these activities, along with the responsibilities of the roles involved in the process. It also includes detailed process maps for each high-level activity, with detailed representations of process activities. The detailed process map may have several decomposition levels depending on the complexity of each high-level activity.
Special attention should be placed on the exception-handling diagram. When modeling a business process, it is very important that we don't end up modeling only the optimal process flow (happy flow). We must not forget to identify the possible exceptions that might occur and specify how these exceptions are handled. An exception-handling diagram shows exactly this.
A well-designed process model should define at least:
The process trigger, which tells us how the process is triggered to start the execution
The necessary input information required in the process
The process result or results
Roles involved in the process or responsible for the process
Responsibilities of the roles within the process, such as responsible-for, executes, participates, supervises, and so on
Metrics used for measuring process efficiency
Events that can interrupt the regular process flow and the compensation logic required to handle these interruption events
Compliance with standards or reference processes
The business goals a process contributes to
When designing the process, it is also particularly important that we identify not just the regular process flow but also the exception flow that each process has.
If an exception occurs, it should be handled. The exception-handling diagram shows how to handle these exceptions. We should specify how exceptions are handled, by whom, and where the process goes to after the exception has been handled.
Often, exceptions require that we compensate activities of the process flow that have already been completed successfully. We might also want to compensate activities if an event interrupts the process flow.
When modeling business processes, our objective should be to develop sound process models. Soundness of the process models can be achieved if we follow a few basic principles:
Syntax: Our model must have correct syntax as defined by the modeling notation. If we use BPMN, we should follow the BPMN syntax rules. Most tools can check the syntax.
Semantics: Our model should also be semantically correct. This means that we have included all relevant activities, decisions, events, documents, and other elements. This also means that the process flow is correct and we have defined how to react to events, how to handle exceptions, and how to compensate if necessary. We should also use the correct names for all elements. Achieving semantic correctness is more difficult than achieving syntactical correctness.
Relevance: We should model only those processes that are relevant to the problem domain. In modeling processes, we could easily get carried away because one process will typically relate to other processes. Sometimes, it is difficult to draw a line between what we should include and what we should not. The most basic principle is to include only those artifacts that are relevant from the perspective of the process and the problem domain we are focusing on. Too much modeling is a waste of time.
Cost versus benefit: We model processes to achieve specific benefits. We should therefore weigh the amount of effort against the anticipated benefits. Usually, the 80/20 rule applies here as well. 80 percent of the benefit comes from 20 percent of the effort, and vice versa. Therefore, it is important to know the level of detail and when it is better to stop modeling. The required level of detail can differ. If we perform process modeling for quality assurance, a lower level of detail is required than if we perform process modeling for an SOA implementation.
Usability: The model should be usable and understandable. Otherwise, the model is worth nothing. Business processes are complex. To achieve usability, we should decompose the model into various levels of detail. How we do the decomposition is important as the parts should be understandable. We usually prefer simple models over more complex ones.
Standards: While modeling business processes, we should use and apply certain standards. First, we should use good practices and patterns. Second, we should use naming conventions. In some industries, standard or reference process models exist (such as eTom for telecom operators). We should look for compliance if it can add business value.
Integration: We should integrate different models that look at the same or similar process domains from different perspectives. The integrated model will reveal all aspects of the process. We should also design a process map where all processes and relationships between them are listed.
Using these and a few other, more specific principles will help make our process models better and more usable over a longer period of time. We should, however, be aware that modeling processes is not easy although it might look easy at first sight. Therefore, in the next section, we will list common problems that we are likely to face.
When modeling business processes, we will face several challenges. We have identified some of these in the following paragraphs.
Modeling business processes should be aligned with the overall business strategy. If the objective of process modeling is not related to specific business goals, then it is a waste of time for all people involved. Therefore, it is crucial that we define, from the beginning, what the goals of process modeling are. The goal can be, for example, to provide end-to-end IT support for a specific process. The goal can also be to improve the efficiency of the process. It is, however, important that we do not stick to such high-level goals. We should precisely articulate the specific goals of the company. We should know the exact process for which we want to develop end-to-end support, where we want to improve the efficiency, and by how much. Without clearly defined goals with measurable outcomes, we should not start process modeling.
When we start process modeling, we should clearly define the responsibilities. In process modeling, people from different organizations participate. They must see value in participating, otherwise, they will not be willing to dedicate their time. Communicating the benefits of process modeling is, therefore, important. Even more important is to have support from the top management. Only the top management can order all employees to participate in the project.
We should define teams that will participate in the process modeling. Here is one possible structure of the team, which has proven to be efficient:
Process owner
Two persons, coming from the same department, to assist the process owner
Process quality representative
Business process analyst (or analysts)
IT representative
Optionally, an external consultant
We also have to define measurable goals to assess whether process management has been done the right way and what the benefits have been.
An important part of business process modeling is communicating the models to all interested parties. This includes company management, unit management, supervisors, employees, quality assurance, and all other interested employees, all of whom can use the process model to better understand what is going on within the organization. They can also use the process model as work instructions.
Publishing the process model and communicating it to all interested employees is also important because, this way, we can gather feedback on the process and improve it even further. Publishing a process on the company's intranet is usually a good way to give visibility to process models.
Feedback on process models can improve quality and can be a good source of ideas for improving and optimizing the process. This is the first step in building continuous awareness about processes and their optimization among process owners and all others involved in the process.
Oracle BPM Suite 12c provides rich process reports that can be used not only for documentation and analysis, but also for communication. We will show how to use process reports later in this book.
According to ancient wisdom, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. This is particularly true for business processes. Measuring different aspects of a business process, such as activity duration, resource utilization, total execution time, average execution time, and so on, is crucial to understanding how the processes perform in the real world. We can only understand the process if we have numbers, and we can get numbers from measuring the process execution.
One of the key elements of process control is BAM. The key objective of BAM is to provide a complete overview of business process execution within the company. The management and other people who are responsible for development and operations of the company use this data. The most important component of BAM is time. Time is crucial because BAM shows actual, near real-time information on process execution. This allows the company to react quickly and efficiently to the changes reflected through process execution.
Whatis.com defines BAM as follows:
"BAM, also called business activity management, is the use of technology to proactively define and analyze critical opportunities and risks in an enterprise to maximize profitability and optimize efficiency. The BAM paradigm can be used to evaluate external as well as internal factors.
Three main steps compose effective implementation of BAM. First, relevant data is gathered in an efficient and timely manner and in sufficient quantities to provide meaningful results. Second, the data is processed to identify and categorize factors relevant to specific concerns. Finally, the data is analyzed and the results displayed in a clear, user-friendly interface so personnel can take appropriate actions."
To provide information for decision making, BAM first has to gather data. This data is gathered from business processes and is related to process activities, resources utilized in these activities, such as employees, and so on. The more the data gathered, the better and the more statistically relevant the derived information. The BAM tools have to gather the data and calculate interesting information that can help in decision making. BAM can process the gathered data in different ways:
Data can be processed immediately. In this way, the related KPIs will be calculated immediately and shown to the supervisors or sent to a decision-support application. Such KPIs can then be recalculated in near real time.
Data can be used to notify supervisors and other people involved in the process that something important has happened. For example, if a KPI value is too high or too low, certain actions can be triggered. A supervisor can be alerted (by e-mail, SMS, or voice call), or an automatic action can be executed.
BAM can also be used to identify patterns in the incoming data and notify or even react to them. Because BAM gathers data from different, independent business processes, BAM can identify certain patterns between the processes and can react to such patterns. This gives an additional level of control and flexibility to the information system.
BAM is not only a system that displays interesting information about processes; it consolidates data gathered from different, often independent, sources too. Connecting this data with past data enables BAM to identify critical situations in process execution or even automatically or semi-automatically solve some frequent critical solutions.
Monitoring the processes closely is essential, and we use KPIs to specify what we wish to monitor. KPIs are financial and nonfinancial metrics used to help an organization define and measure process efficiency. Monitoring KPIs in real time is nothing but BAM. KPIs should be related to the strategy of a company.
Examples of a KPI are the average revenue per customer, average time for response to a customer call, average order amount, and so on. KPIs differ from company to company. Therefore, the first step in using KPIs is to identify them.
We identify KPIs for a selected business process, which has to be specified well. We must also have clear goals and performance requirements for that process. When we define KPIs, we should follow these SMART rules:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Result-oriented or Relevant
Time-bound
When identifying KPIs, we should apply considerable thought to them because, in practice, KPIs have a very long lifespan. After we have defined them, it is difficult to change them because, if we change them, we lose the comparisons to performance in the previous years or periods.
KPIs should also be defined in a way that will enable comparison with other similar companies. Therefore, KPIs should not be unduly confined to a company's internal specifics.
In the real world, measuring KPIs efficiently and accurately is a major challenge. SOA, together with BPM, offers huge advantages over previous IT architectures because most SOA platforms provide KPI measurements as a built-in function of process monitoring and control.
Process optimization offers huge opportunities for each company to distinguish itself from its competitors and focus more closely on customer wishes and requirements. Customers assess the whole shopping experience and not just the product or service. Therefore, it makes sense to optimize processes at all levels, from handling a sales inquiry to processing an order, product or service, production, delivery, and support.
A systematic approach to process optimization, which should include all end-to-end processes, has multiple positive effects on a company. It can help increase the competitive advantage of a company in several ways. The following are some of the most important effects of process optimization:
Increased sales of products or services through better service, better and faster production, increased flexibility, better customer experience, the ability to better sense customer requirements, and so on.
Cost savings are the most obvious benefits and are directly related to optimizing activity execution times and people and resource utilization. Simplifying business processes also saves costs. Sometimes, process optimization helps in identifying processes or parts of processes that can be outsourced or shared.
Improved efficiency in business operations is another important aspect. Process optimization is not only about minimizing process activity times. It is also about coordinating private processes (those processes that a company executes internally) with public processes (processes that involve business partners). Just-in-time delivery and manufacturing are just two examples of highly-coordinated business processes between several partners. Such processes save money and allow more efficient business operations.
Increased customer satisfaction can be achieved through process optimization. Better support for customers, faster response times, and higher visibility into processes (for example, the ordering process where the customer can monitor online what happens with their order) are directly related to customer satisfaction. Integrating online customer support with a problem ticketing system is another example, and we could identify more.
Improved exception handling can also be achieved. Exceptions are the most undesirable events in business processes because they interrupt or even stop the usual process execution. The fact is that when exceptions occur, they take up considerable time and resources. Optimizing and automating exception handling can be very useful.
From a technical perspective, process optimization is about developing optimized process models, which we will look at in the next section.
Process optimization is the final phase in the BPM cycle. The objective of this phase is to develop the optimized process models called TO-BE models.
Developing the TO-BE process model is a challenging task because we must balance different factors. First, we have to define the objectives that we want to realize through process optimization. The most obvious objective can be that the process performs faster with less utilization of resources and people. The other objective can be to improve visibility into the process execution. Knowing the stage at which the process execution currently is can be helpful to the management as well as to the customers, who might even be able to track the process online. The objective of optimization can also result in improvements in the quality of products/services, better working conditions for employees, reduced impact on the environment, and so on.
Then, we have to identify where to start the optimization. To identify this, we use the data gathered in the process execution and control phases. The data gathered by BAM tools can be very helpful in identifying process bottlenecks in real time and in identifying activities or sets of activities that would be suitable for optimization.
Another way of identifying process optimization points is process simulation, which we mentioned earlier in this chapter. It is important to understand that BPM provides tools that propagate the data from BAM (process execution and control) into the process-modeling tool, where this real data can be used for process simulation. This is important because the tedious work of estimating process runtime parameters (activity execution, resource utilization, number of requests in a given period of time, and so on) is eliminated. At the same time, data gathered through BAM is much more accurate than estimates.
An important aspect of process optimization is new ideas. In closed organizational structures, the people involved in process optimization may be blinkered and may lack the ability to look at the process from a broader perspective. It would, therefore, be useful to recruit external consultants or other people from outside the organization, who can generate fresh ideas. Only in this way can we realize the full potential of process optimization.
However, when we gather new ideas, we should be careful to assess each new idea and find out whether it is realizable. We have to find a balance between new ideas and the level of changes a company's existing organizational structure can accommodate.
As employees do not like changes, we have to be careful in deciding how much change we want to introduce at one go. Ideally, we could change the process model considerably and try to implement changes in one large step. However, in many organizations, this has proved to be a failure because employees were unable to accommodate such changes overnight. If we do not invest enough time in communication with employees, they could start showing resistance to the changes. Therefore, it is often better to optimize in smaller steps and reach complete optimization over several stages.
On the other hand, we also have to be aware that process optimizations require modifications in the applications. Software modifications can be costly and they require time and resources. Therefore, from the IT perspective, it might be better to modify the applications at one go, that is, to optimize all at once.
Process optimizations often require changes in a company's organizational structure. We have to think about these changes too and obtain the necessary support from the top management. Otherwise, we will not be able to change the organizational structure.
Finally, we have to check whether the optimizations have been successful and whether we have achieved our goals. We do this by process simulation before it goes into production and after the process has been deployed to production through process control and monitoring.
Process optimization is not an easy task. The following are some common problems that you might face during optimization:
Too little imagination: When optimizing processes, we should not only improve bottlenecks in existing processes, but also include innovations and new approaches.
Noncritical experience consideration of other companies: Although it is good to consider the experiences of other companies in process optimization, we have to be critical while comparing their experiences with ours and the facts related to our company. Therefore, before adopting them, we should assess whether these experiences are really best practices, and if they are, we should adapt them to our specifics.
Too much focus on IT: When modeling or optimizing processes, we should not focus only on end-to-end support by IT. This may generate unrealistically high expectations. IT cannot solve all problems.
Praxis-relevance: An optimized process model might seem perfect, but this does not guarantee that the process model will work perfectly in the real world. Therefore, we should put enough effort in process implementation; otherwise, we might end up with a failure.
Process metrics: We should measure process-related metrics, such as KPIs, to be able to assess whether the process works efficiently. Without metrics, we will not be able to optimize processes because we will not be able to identify where the real problems are hiding.
With this, we have concluded our discussion on the BPM life cycle.
In this book, we will use Oracle BPM Suite 12c to demonstrate the design principles for process-driven architectures. Oracle BPM Suite 12c provides comprehensive BPM tools, ranging from BA modeling, over business process modeling using BPMN, to BAM, analytics, and comprehensive integration with SOA, business rules, business events, and other aspects. For more technical information about Oracle BPM Suite 12c, please refer to www.oracle.com/us/technologies/bpm/.
In the next section, we will have a brief look at SOA.
To automate business processes, the challenge from the technical perspective converts to development of process applications, often referred to as composite applications. To be able to develop process/composite applications, that is, to compose business processes out of services, we need corresponding technologies.
SOA provides the technical architecture to develop end-to-end support for business processes. SOA achieves this objective by exposing an organization's IT assets as reusable business services that can be composed into processes on the one hand and can integrate and communicate more easily on the other hand.
SOA minimizes the semantic gap between process models and executable code. It achieves this objective by providing a common language to business analysts, IT architects, and developers. In this context, we should not forget the importance of reuse, which is the key to fast development of new solutions and minimized testing efforts (due to reuse of existing artifacts), as shown in the following figure:
Figure 3: Relation between BPM and SOA
The service life cycle enables IT agility, while the process life cycle enables business agility. The following figure shows how the process and service life cycles match and how they interconnect:
Figure 4: Process and service life cycle
From the bottom-up perspective, SOA is integration architecture. It provides technologies and approaches for the systematic integration of existing applications and the development of new solutions. With SOA, software architects develop a high-level integration architecture that uses common concepts to share data, information, and business logic between applications in a controlled, transactional manner using a service bus or other supporting technologies, such as rule engines, registries, and repositories. SOA is based on typed communication with messages that conform to common schemas. In SOA, in its new-generation avatar, business events have been introduced that provide an alternative approach to the realization of one of the most important goals of SOA—loose coupling. Loose coupling is an approach where different software services and components share the lowest common denominator of dependencies. This makes the application architecture more robust and resistant to changes. This will allow applications, components, and services to evolve and change with, or without, minimal effect on other applications, components, and services.
From this perspective, BPM and SOA are crucial to increasing the agility, improving time to market, and lowering the operational costs.
The following figure encapsulates this discussion:
Figure 5: SOA for increased agility
Let's look at some of the benefits of this approach.
SOA can improve the agility of IT by enabling the development and adaption of business processes quickly and efficiently using the composition of business services, that is, through programming in the large. As business services are designed for reuse and integration, the design, development, and test efforts are considerably reduced. SOA promotes reuse, which leads to increased standardization and compliance at the enterprise level. SOA also minimizes the business-to-IT gap.
SOA is concerned with the development of loosely-coupled information architectures, which shield business processes and services from changes and function independently of versions, locations, or technical details of applications systems. SOA also enables easier and less painful migration from legacy systems, consolidation of duplicated resources, master data management, multichannel access to applications, and the flexibility to develop variants of processes from the same base. Loose coupling enables IT assets to develop and evolve without the limitations imposed by interdependencies and point-to-point integrations.
SOA introduces a new dimension to application development with a major consequence—that of better aligning business with IT. SOA raises the level of abstraction from technologies to business services. SOA introduces business vocabulary to IT, which simplifies the connection between the IT and business people and enables them to better understand each other. Above all, SOA talks about applications in terms of business processes. Therefore, it does not require a complex mapping of requirements to represent the actual software. Further, SOA provides the ability to achieve two-way mapping between the business process model and the executable processes (and services). This guarantees better alignment between business and IT in the long run—even after several maintenance and upgrade cycles.
As SOA is related to BPM, it will encourage companies to think about business processes and achieve better collaboration between business analysts and IT. The business will discover that the SOA architecture is agile enough to adapt to requirements quickly, and IT will better understand the needs of the business. This will lead to business process optimizations and improvements and overall process excellence, which will have important impacts on the overall efficiency of the company.
SOA has been evolving over the years and expanded its reach beyond services, orchestrations, mediations, business rules, and human tasks. One of the major enhancements is business events, which are a part of event-driven architecture (EDA). The EDA approach allows us to trigger services by events and not by explicitly invoking operations. This leads to even more loosely-coupled architectures, where a service component can trigger an event and several other components can subscribe to the event.
In addition to simple, event-based relations, events can also represent a means for integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In such cases, devices will generate large numbers of events, which need to be processed in real time or near real time. In such scenarios, we are not interested in individual events but often need to find patterns in event streams. This brings us to complex event processing (CEP).
The number of events and other data generated by business processes, composite applications, and services opens the opportunity for analysis of this data. This is where SOA connects to big data. Big data is particularly interesting for analyzing great amounts of data, which can be nonstructured or semistructured. Sometimes, this data needs to be analyzed in real or near real time, which brings us to fast data.
Furthermore, SOA has been designed around XML, web services, WSDL, and SOAP. Lately, another type of web service has emerged, RESTful services, or REST for short. REST services differ considerably from SOAP services. Instead of interface with operations, REST services use resources, which map URIs to specific actions. They also utilize HTTP methods. Although REST services can use XML format for payloads, it is more common that they use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which is simpler and easier to parse. Introducing REST to SOA has been a challenge lately and has been successfully solved on several SOA platforms, such as Oracle SOA Suite.
REST enablement is important for integration of BPM/SOA solutions with mobile devices and with modern client-side web development HTML5/JavaScript web pages, which are also known as one-page applications.
Mobile enablement is one of the key steps towards multichannel and omnichannel support. In contrast to multichannel support, where different channels for clients exists, possibly all leading to the same business logic in the backend, omnichannel support also provides true integration between channels on the backend, which means that a client can switch channels while retaining the session.
Although SOA is an integration architecture, new challenges have emerged to the integration with the cloud. As more applications use the SaaS model, integration with cloud applications and services needs careful consideration. Cloud integration can be solved with adapters or with Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS). The cloud also provides new opportunities for integration and process support directly in the cloud.
The cloud is also related with the way applications are packaged and deployed. Traditionally, applications, even if designed and developed according to SOA, are packaged and deployed as single monolith archives (such as SAR, EAR, WAR, and JAR). Scaling such applications in the cloud is, however, not efficient. Therefore, modern applications are built following the microservice architecture that defines autonomous microservices as self-contained building blocks. Microservice architecture considerably improves flexibility and scalability and enables easier migration to new technologies and versions.
Finally, the emphasis on services and their interfaces has become even more important. As the number of APIs is growing, it is not only governance that matters, but the whole API management life cycle. Successful management of APIs is the key to the API economy and will become very important not only for Internet companies, but for all enterprises. The importance is denoted by the API economy.
In this book, we will use Oracle SOA Suite 12c, which provides a comprehensive platform for SOA. Oracle SOA Suite provides full support for SOA and also addresses the new aspects of SOA. It provides Oracle Event Processing for EDA and CEP. It provides support for REST services, integration with the cloud, analytics integration, and even tools for API management. For more technical information on Oracle SOA Suite, please refer to www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/.
In this chapter, we looked at the importance of business processes. We discussed why understanding business process is crucial for each organization. Modeling business processes is an important step towards understanding them. We have seen that business processes can be modeled at different levels of detail. Once modeled, such process models can be used for automation. Also, business processes should be optimized over time.
However, focusing on a single business process is not enough. Therefore, it is essential to design the business architecture, which provides the big-picture insight into an organizational structure. We have also seen that the business architecture should be considered as a part of the bigger enterprise architecture.
We gave you an overview of the BPM life cycle, which consists of business process design, process implementation, process execution and control, and process optimization. We focused on process design, where we explained the methodologies and notations. We mentioned adaptive case management. Further, we discussed business process modeling principles. We also discussed the process implementation, execution, and monitoring phases. We introduced BAM and KPIs and explained why it is useful for decision makers. We also identified some typical problems in process optimization.
We looked at the relation between SOA and BPM. SOA provides the technology platform for the implementation of the IT architecture based on business services, which is a foundation for business processes. SOA is an architecture that has introduced several important new concepts into application development. Lately, SOA has also introduced new building blocks, such as business events, EDA, CEP and integration with the IoT, big data and fast data, REST support and mobile enablement, omnichannel support, integration with the cloud, focus on microservice architecture, and API Management.
In the next chapter, we will look at the methodology for modeling business processes for SOA.
